WhatsApp Says It Banned Over 2 Million Accounts in in One Month to Prevent Harmful Behaviour

WhatsApp says that it banned 20 lakh accounts between May 15 and June 15, 2021, to try and prevent harmful behaviour. In its first transparency report, published under the new Information Technology (Intermediary Guidelines and Digital Media Ethics Code) Rules, 2021, the company revealed that it had banned 20,11,000 accounts in this one-month period. The Facebook-owned messaging platform identifies Indian accounts through the +91 country code of the mobile number used to register. It also added that India alone accounts for 25 percent of all the accounts banned in the world.

WhatsApp published the first edition of its intermediary guidelines report on Thursday, and in this, the company highlighted its own actions to prevent harmful behaviour. “Our top focus is preventing accounts from sending harmful or unwanted messages at scale,” WhatsApp said in its report that it also shared on email to Gadgets 360. “We maintain advanced capabilities to identify these accounts sending a high or abnormal rate of messages and banned 2 millions accounts in India alone from May 15 – June 15 attempting this kind of abuse.”

“In addition to the behavioural signals from accounts, we rely on available unencrypted information including user reports, profile photos, and group photos and descriptions, besides deploying advanced AI tools and resources to detect and prevent abuse on our platform,” WhatsApp added.